Robert Tracinski - Is "Wokeness" Overblown?

Speaker 0 00:00:01 I see people starting to come in. Thank you for joining us today for, uh, is wokeness overblown by senior scholar, Rob of the Atlas society. So I'm Scott Schiff. Uh, thank you all for joining us today. I'm substitute hosting for the Atlas society CEO, Jennifer Grossman. Uh, we are, uh, very happy to have the Atlas society. Senior scholar, Robert discussing is wokeness overblown. And then after Rob discusses it, uh, we'll open it up to questions on the subject. So I encourage you to raise your hand and we'll bring you up to be part of the discussion. Uh, the session is being recorded for educational purposes. Rob, thanks again for doing this session today, um, is wokeness over bloom. Speaker 1 00:01:06 All right. So the reason I'm asking this, partly because, uh, there's a article I read recently that makes about the best case you could make for that. I think, uh, by Nicholas Grossman, somebody who actually, you know, I communicate with on Twitter, he's from Ark digital, uh, a magazine that's out there that, uh, online magazine and he possessed the most reasonable case you can make for the idea that it, all of that has been overstated. And the, so I was trying to think in terms of how, how what's the answer to this? How do I answer? How do I reply to that? Well, my response to that be now the argument he makes it raises some, I think raises some interesting, a legitimate questions. All right. So, um, w the essence of the argument is that the, the cases that we hear about the debates that we hear about over people being quote, unquote canceled, uh, for their views are a very, very small number of people. Speaker 1 00:02:11 Usually number usually they're very prominent people. They're people like J K Rowling, or at the current moment, there's people going nuts about Joe Rogan, who has a big podcast, and it's this very small minority of people it's not really affecting the, the average person is essentially a nut picking argument. So this is the idea. Nut picking is a term that has come up recently, where, uh, in the last five to 10 years, somebody coined it, uh, basically describing this journalistic technique of going out and finding the craziest person you could possibly find, and then asserting that person to be representative of the, of a whole movement or of a whole, uh, side of the political debate or representative of the culture. In general, you pick the craziest person, you can find you, you pick the nuts, you know, it's, it's, it's, I think it's a, an analogy to cherry picking, right? Speaker 1 00:03:05 Cherry picking needs, you go out and you find the very best examples of something, and you ignore all the bad examples. Well, this is you find the craziest example and you ignore all the saner examples. And this is the case essentially saying that, that, that wokeness has been overblown, that people are going out and finding the craziest examples and focusing only on the three small number of really crazy examples and ignoring the fact that this does not, is not something that actually affects, or is a thing or a problem for the vast overwhelming majority of people. Alright, so that is the essence of the argument. And I went to my initial response to that, but I, there are some additional complexities that come up in this that I want to bring up. My initial response to that is that sure is probably true. This is a relatively small number of actual cases, or at least a small number of actual cases that we hear about. Speaker 1 00:04:03 And it's, and the office has the targets are people who are already prominent, who are, you know, like Joe Rogan or J K Rowling. Neither one of them is going to be canceled because they're too big to be canceled. If Joe Rogan gets kicked off Spotify, where he has this podcast that you know, is, is he has this giant cotton, enormous multi-million dollar contract with Spotify. If he gets kicked off of Spotify, he'll find the other place he'll, he'll get paid possibly even more, or find the bigger oddity in somewhere else. So it's, it's, it's not possible to cancel Joe Rogan, but I think it's worthwhile to point out that if they go with that, when they go after the prominent people, that's our opportunity to push back. Because when they go after the less prominent people, after they go after this small fry and the person who's not rich, and who's not famous, what's likely to happen is that person's likely to get crushed without anybody ever knowing, because they're not rich and they're not famous. Speaker 1 00:05:00 So you, you, you set the example. It's an example that you set at the top so that when they come after a much less prominent person, and then there are people out there have been cataloging, various things that happen. You know, these cases of political correctness that happened to people who are not rich and famous, who are not well-known. Uh, there was one case a while back of a, uh, it was a janitor at a, at a university who was asking somebody to move and got accused of being a racist, uh, cause there were in a building there weren't supposed to be in and he was trying to tell them, you're not supposed to be here. You need to leave. Uh, and he was got accused of being a racist and almost got and got fired from his job and all these things. And it was a total injustice, but because the justice was done against a person who was not rich and famous, it could very well have gone unnoticed. Speaker 1 00:05:49 If, if, uh, somebody hadn't done, a journalists had done an article on it. So, you know, the idea is that you want to establish the precedent for how these things work with the case of the people who are rich and famous, where you get lots of publicity so that you can establish standards of free speech standards of procedural protection that will then protect everybody else. So that's one of the answers to this and to give an interesting example of that for recently, um, that, uh, there's a case that just happened George Washington university. Uh, there was somebody put up some posters, uh, by an artist, uh, called, uh, um, tried hoping I'm proud of this, correct. The artist's name is body you a cow and it's, uh, it's a Chinese, uh, Australian artists, uh, uh, artists are trying to who's out in Australia, who's a dissonant artist and they were, uh, they were sort of based on the artwork from the Olympics, except that they were satires on or, or expos AEs of the, you know, the genocide and the repression going on in China. Speaker 1 00:07:01 Uh, so it's like the biathlon event is, is a, uh, uh, a Chinese government guard shooting, a prisoner, that kind of thing. Uh, so the, you know, these are really sort of trenchant, um, uh, sapphires or parrot or parodies or trenchant commentaries on the dictatorship in China, there was a tiny student association, and this is something that happens. It's kind of a bit of a scandal that people don't talk about that there are these Chinese student associations that are supposed to be organizations for Chinese students who are at American universities, but oftentimes they are sort of behind the scenes backed by the Chinese regime and what they're really there to do with, they're really there to police Chinese students at American universities to make sure they don't speak out against, you know, they don't think, oh, I'm in America, I'm free now and speak out against the regime. Speaker 1 00:07:51 So these people complained about it to the president of George Washington university. And it's an immediate risk now that's, that's all the background. But the interesting thing is his immediate response, the president's university immediate response because they said, oh, this is racist against China. You know, they're using the language of American wokeness to protect a genocidal regime. And the immediate response of the president to George Washington university was to say, oh, I'm offended by these posters to it. I'm going to fight off who's responsible. And that, of course he, you know, gets it earful about this and realize this, that, you know, what the posters are really about and that he's actually offering to, you know, enforce communist, uh, um, dictatorship, the rules of communist dictatorship against his own students and he backtracks. But what was interesting is how this president is his university. He has been trained that the minute there's any accusation of racism, he preemptively caves into it without looking at any of the evidence without knowing what's going on without doing the slightest investigation. Speaker 1 00:08:54 He immediately proclaims themselves to be offended. And we'll, we're going to have that investigation to find out who's responsible. So this is why you have these battles so that you don't have the people in control. People in authority, people in positions of leader, of so-called leadership in the organizations like this, you don't have them trained to do that, to immediately begin canceling people, you know, as a reflux, without gaining any evidence without knowing what they're talking about without thinking the issue through. So this is why you have these, you know, this is why you take these, these large and prominent test cases. And you make a big deal about them is to train people that visit these. This is how we do this. We do not just reflectively cave into every criticism. We don't reflexively apologize. We don't reflexively cut somebody off the minute somebody, you know, on Twitter makes a demand. Speaker 1 00:09:48 All right. So that's all on one side. Now I'm going to go back to one area though, where I think is where the people who are saying political, uh, that cancel culture, the, the complaints about cancel culture, half it overblown, where I think they have a point, and that gets us back to Joe Rogan. So the valid criticism of Joe Rogan and his podcast is that he has been inviting on some actual, real, legitimate crackpots on the issue of, of COVID and the issue of the pandemic and the vaccines he's burned. You had these anti-vax scientists who have been making and not just scientists. And he's an Alex Berenson on there who is really just the tortillas for just making things up out of whole cloth. When it comes to, you know, these outrageous Kim, uh, claims about how the vaccine is dangerous and it's going to kill you and all that sort of thing. Speaker 1 00:10:44 So there are legitimate complaints that information on that. And, you know, if George was an idiot, if you go interview a wide range of people to figure out who knows what they're talking about, and who's, who's, you know, blowing smoke. And I think Joe Rogan hasn't, you know, really depth, deeply looked at it, but as far as I can tell his appeal is this just of this regular guy who just talks to anybody. So he's not doing any of the work of figuring out who really knows what the trial not and who doesn't. And so what I've been seeing online, especially in these, and it's come up very strongly in the case, but it's a thing that people see, oh, cancel and rubbed is cutting out slightly canceled hemophilia. Really? Oh, am I finding out, is this better a little bit? Is this better? Yes, I can. Speaker 1 00:11:53 Can you hear me? Oh, it's the better go ahead. Yeah. I'm having connectivity issues. Hopefully it will be solved in the next few days. Um, so where was I? Oh yeah. So that in, in trying to defend somebody best against being canceled, did that have to say, oh, if he's being canceled, therefore he's a truth-telling hero. And they have to, you have a lot of these people going out there and going to bat for Joe Rogan and oh, you know, drove Oregon as the Tribune to the common man and, and building him up at diff and essentially defending him against all criticism, valid or invalid speak to not canceling him. And the point that I've been trying to argue with people. Um, actually I spent, I planned this topic on this podcast topic on a long time ago. And just by coincidence, I spent a couple of hours today arguing with online with people about this is that we have to have this concept of it's valid to criticize someone. Speaker 1 00:12:46 And it's valid to criticize someone for actual things that they do wrong and things that, that, that they do badly while at the same time still defending their right to speak. And that criticism is not the same thing as censorship and, uh, that we have, I think it's even a stronger case for free speech to say, um, I think this is doing a bad job. I think this person needs to be criticized for, you know, in competence or restlessness or irresponsibility in how they're doing their job. But at the same time, I also think we need to, you know, have, uh, have clear standards, uh, uh, that we maintain a culture of free speech where we are not rushing to censor or no, I won't say sense or rushing to cancel or get rid of anybody who, uh, uh, for any reason. So I think the criticisms of Joe Rogan are, are the initial criticisms of Joe Rogan were largely I think, correct. Speaker 1 00:13:47 But at the same time, you have to be able to give those criticisms and figure out exactly where the boundaries between that and quote unquote, cancel culture lie. And I think the real, you know, the, uh, it goes back to this issue of the culture of free speech, right? So if Spotify were to fire Joe Rogen, they were to cancel his contract to stop curing him. That would not be censorship in the relevant sense of, you know, the government exercising censorship. So a lot of the arguments we're having here are really not so much not about whether the government is going to censor somebody, but it's about whether, what, what, how, how private companies make decisions about who they let onto their platforms. And they obviously have to be able to make those decisions. They have to be able to cross the line to draw lines. Speaker 1 00:14:35 And I think the real debate is, is, or are they drawing lines at reasonable points? Are they just, are they just caving into, uh, the conformity of public pressure? Are they caving into the, the moral panic of the moment, or are they drawing legitimate lines that are defense rationally defensible, and that still allow for a, a, a necessary diversity of opinions. So that's where I would say is that the point that people saying cancel culture is overblown, is that it is true that private companies with private platforms have to be able to draw these lines. And in fact, having them draw the lines is way better than having government draw the lines. Uh, so they have to draw these lines about who they watch on their platform and who they don't. And the real debate is, well, what standards should we have? And we should, I, you know, as part of the culture that this argument of quote unquote, the culture of free speech, we should draw those lines at a more expansive way, because we regard a diversity of views and a vigorous debate as important, but at the same time, it can't be a total absence of any standards at all. Speaker 1 00:15:46 So I want to put that up for discussion and, and, uh, uh, uh, Southern as something that we, we sort of talk through about what is the debate of cancel culture really about, and where do you know w what does the quote unquote culture of free speech require and where do we draw those lines? Speaker 0 00:16:06 Great. Um, well, I want to invite people up on the stage, raise your hand. We'll be glad to bring you up. Um, I'm curious, just based on what you said, you know, there's just something about seeing this pattern of, of people going after Rogan. They didn't care about what he said five or six years ago until, you know, for whatever reason he was targeted when he went after, you know, whatever narrative you want to call it, the establishment narrative. And, you know, there, there's just that, that's part of why they're, they're kind of making these people heroes because we see what's happening and we want someone that's fighting back against it. Speaker 1 00:16:49 Yeah. That the problem though, is that, see, it's not everybody who's going to be targeted in. This is going to be targeted for a bad reason. Right? So let's talk about rognel, but Rogan, nobody is complaining about Joe Brogan five or six years ago, but I think he was not delving into as I I'm. Now. I'm not sure exactly how the, the history of this, but as I read as I, my understanding is that over the years, he has gone more and more into sort of ideological issues and, and political debates. And, you know, and into the, into the he's become more and more going into the intellectual realm as the podcasts are over the years. So he would not have been necessarily as, as high profile on this, but here's the thing people traditionally went after Rogan because for, I think he had a legitimate complaint about him, because you just say, oh, he's against the establishment narrative, but he was also giving a platform to people who are, I mean, I think Alex Berenson is the best example, a guy who was really just, you know, there is no argument over whether Alex Berenson is a crackpot, right? Speaker 1 00:17:57 There are some other people you could say, oh, well, you know, you can argue about masks one way or the other, but Alex Berenson as a guy who's going out there flagrantly, lying to people and making huge amounts of money by flagrantly, lying to people and telling them what they want to hear about the virus. And Speaker 2 00:18:15 I'll jump in with a, with a playing the devil's advocate. I mean, I listened to all of Joe Rogan's podcasts with Alex Berenson. I've read Penn Damia. I've read his series on vaccines. I don't know if there's any evidence. I haven't seen it that he's making money with this. I mean, he has a subscription option on, um, his sub stack, like many, Speaker 1 00:18:47 He's got a giant sub-second, he's selling a book, he's making more money than I am. Speaker 2 00:18:52 Well, I, you know, that that may or not be a high, a high bar, but, um, and you know, what I've been reading from his posts is he saying, Hey, here's one study. This is what I think it means. Here's another study. Um, what is he lying about? Speaker 1 00:19:11 Okay. So this is Jennifer. I, this is an issue. I think we're going to have to hash out because I, you have fallen for a lot of this stuff. I'm very, I mean, I feel very strongly about this because here's the thing as a writer, it's my job when something big and important, like this happens when there's a pandemic, my job is to go out and you go to find out who are the experts? Who knows what they're talking about. Berenson had been going around basically claiming the vaccines are ineffective, uh, claiming they're actually dangerous. Uh, there's been extensive debunkings. You can go online and find them extensive debunkings, uh, from, you know, actual scientists who are, who will go and explain patiently to you. All the things that are wrong. This is a guy who has been wrong about the pandemic from the very beginning and, uh, uh, has gotten to a huge audience by basically telling people what they want to hear, which is that the whole thing is been overblown. Speaker 1 00:20:07 It's all invented. And that the vaccine, you know, that the claims that the vaccines are, are, are, uh, effective, are totally wrong. He's been, he's been pushing a lot of misinformation. Now we can go to have, I think I've got a clubhouse scheduled, uh, for, for, I scheduled for late February. Cause I figured the overcrowd and William will be done by then where I'm going to go in and, and go at some of this stuff and look at some of these claims about, you know, how we handled the pandemic and what we did, right. And what we did wrong and maybe try to get some perspective on it. But I think there's not a lot of controversy over the fact that Alex Berenson has been pushing a lot of wrong narratives, right? So there's been, but there's this, this push out there to say that anybody who's challenging, quote unquote, the establishment narrative must somehow be that there's, you know, that the establishment narrative by virtue of being the establishment narrative must be wrong. Speaker 1 00:21:04 And so those had attempt to try to defend these people and, uh, uh, Y and I, as them for challenging the establishment narrative, but sometimes people who challenge the establishment narrative are doing, uh, hindsight, who's been in there. Things like pushing ivermectin is the all bull. You have a miracle cure for it, for COVID called Iraq ivermectin and pushing that. And, you know, the actual scientific evidence as it's come out, there's been numerous studies has been that ivermectin is really not effective. It doesn't really make much difference one way or the other in, in, uh, in dealing with COVID, there are much more effective therapies. There's new things coming out. So again, it's the idea of, of pushing people, promoting people who have a narrative that isn't really backed up by his hand defect facts. And there's a, this is what I talk about. The, the concern about wokeness being overblown is that there's a reflex to say, oh, you know, uh, anybody who is against the establishment narrative, therefore we have to rush to defend him. Speaker 1 00:22:14 And no, you don't have to rush to defend them. Some of those people are legitimately, you know, they're, they they're either crackpots or they're have, you know, made, uh, errors in their, in their reasoning or judgment, and they can be criticized for that. And, um, I think that you don't want to have a situation where you have that all or nothing where you either, you can't criticize Rogan for either you're gonna cancel Rogan, or you can't criticize him for, uh, uh, for not doing his due diligence and his research on who he has on a show. Speaker 0 00:22:50 Yeah. And I don't, uh, not to get too far off the subject and I want to encourage everyone to raise your hand to be part of this, and we'll bring you up on the stage. But, uh, you know, I think most people don't think Rogan's perfect. It's just, they, the people that support him don't want him fired over this. Um, just to, uh, touch on, you know, the establishment narrative. Uh, we had, uh, Phil Magnus on our podcast and, uh, he was talking about how, you know, uh, he's the one that got that freedom of information act that showed that Fowchee and Collins were doing a devastating take down of the great Barrington declaration, which was really just questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns, which now at Johns Hopkins university has also come out and somewhat said they don't, it doesn't have as much effectiveness. And that's the of thing that makes people support, you know? And then when we see people getting attacked, whenever they, they go after it, we think that it's related to, you know, these guys ordering a devastating tank down. Speaker 1 00:23:58 Well, I mean, uh, if you're a public health official and you, as somebody who says something you think is wrong, you might want to do a quote unquote, devastating takedown. Now what that presumably would mean would be an argument, right? Saying, here's why this is wrong. Here's, you know, here's the facts of why I think that's wrong. And that's, I think that's a legitimate part of public debate to do, want to do a devastating takedown on, on your opponents. We do that all the time and that's just Speaker 0 00:24:23 Scientists. Speaker 1 00:24:24 Well, of course, for government scientists, I mean, they are in the process. They are, let's put it this way now. I, I, you can go into whether how exactly how they did it and maybe they were wrong in their facts. But the point is that if you're in the process, if you're in the job of communicating, what you think is the best public health advice to the public, you are in the public, you are in the media debates, right? You are a player, a participant in the media debate. So of course, you're going to, you're going to debate it, right. You're going to try to say, okay, we'll be here. This person made a claim. I wanted to do a take down of that. I think getting upset about that is basically you're getting upset over the fact that there is a public health officials with a public health messaging function. Speaker 1 00:25:05 Right. They're going to do that. So now I'm not, I'm not here to defend Fowchee in everything he's possibly said. My point is, this is this. You have to look at the standards we have, right. And the standards are that we have to settle things by debate and argument and evidence and, and, and, uh, uh, through rational standards. Right? So the idea is that, you know, you don't, you don't dismiss the establishment narrative just because it's the establishment that dead, or just because of the government is the government. This is the government's message. Therefore it must be wrong. You then look at the facts. You look at the narratives now, for example, um, on the issue of lockdowns now, uh, I mean, I was interviewing people who, uh, uh, you know, very good scientists who were skeptical of lockdowns being an effective method at the very beginning. Speaker 1 00:26:00 So this has been a debate that's existed, one side or the other. The problem is that people then use this to say, oh, well, because you know how she, because of how she decided you would to argue great bearings, um, it's okay to have, uh, uh, Joe Rogan, broadcasting falsehoods about the vaccine being ineffective, right? You have to have the rational standards that apply to everyone, uh, on both sides. So I think that the idea that, you know, and, and so that, that devastating take down thing bothers me because the idea that, you know, it really is that it's okay for someone who's, who's engaged in public messaging. It was getting ideas out to the public, whether they worked for the government or not, it's okay for them to be going out there and providing what are they think are arguments against the person. Now, if they had said, we don't want a devastating take down, we want to, um, you know, uh, put pressure on where we will. Speaker 1 00:27:03 We want to, uh, to, to, um, to ban this person would use government, uh, authority to try to shut them down and prevent them from saying it, that would be a very different issue, but you're really saying, you know, if I liked the idea that, that, um, you know, th that everyone should be required to then put forward an argument, right? So cancel culture cannot be used, and this is what the, this is why I'm making this argument. Cause I've seen this used a lot that, that cancel culture and the complaints about cancel culture are sometimes used as a shield to exempt someone for criticism, for something they've legitimately said, that was, that was wrong. Um, on the grounds that, well, if you, if you criticize them, then therefore you must be in favor of, you know, the other side, which wants to have them fired from their job and completely, and or once have them censored by the government or whatever. Speaker 1 00:27:57 So it can be used sometimes as a, you know, everybody wants to create, and I've, I've seen the, the, right's doing this a lot, uh, this sort of, especially the, the illiberal conservative types, doing this a lot, which is to say that, um, they w everything wants, they want everything to be a binary choice. Binary choice is their favorite phrase to between either. You must totally agree with me, or you totally agree with the other side and you can't criticize books, essentially. You know, this is the, this, the there's this youth, you know, they like to drop this out at election time where they say, look, do you, they're going to vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican. There are no other options. That's a binary choice. So therefore it's one or the other. And what has happened, especially in the last couple of years, last five or six years, is this has been broadened to sort of a cultural argument, right. That it's in any issue of public debate in any contentious, uh, uh, issue. There's, there's, you, you have to take my side or you're one of those guys way over there on the other side, and you can't possibly be criticized, be somewhere, uh, you know, at right angles to that criticizing both. And that's, I think the, uh, the misuse of cancel culture, uh, complaints is that it's a way to exempt your side from criticism because it's either canceled culture or you support me. Speaker 0 00:29:17 Well, it's almost like the left saying, uh, you know, or the woke saying either you support this or you're racist. Speaker 1 00:29:24 Oh yeah, no, that's definitely true. It's the same technique use of both sides. Go ahead. Speaker 0 00:29:28 Uh, thank you for your patient. Speaker 3 00:29:34 Yeah, no, uh, interesting topic. I'm glad that, uh, glad that y'all are tackling this, um, wokeness comes up on clubhouse quite a bit, as you can probably imagine. And, um, it's, it's nice to have, uh, you folks leading this conversation, um, but in response to like what's happening with Joe Rogan, uh, specifically, um, you know, there's, there's a few things that happened. So the, the first and foremost thing is that he provided an alternative to mainstream media and he was out performing them, which then becomes dangerous because he's providing a platform, uh, that's reaching more people and it's not staying on narrative. And so whether people love Joe Rogan hate Joe Rogan, what we can't deny is that Joe Rogan has a massive audience. And I think that's where a lot of the fear comes from when he was, uh, challenged by, uh, musicians, uh, that, uh, that, uh, I hadn't even heard of in many, many years. Speaker 3 00:30:44 I like it, it, it, it was almost like as they started coming out of the woodwork, you know, it was a reminder of like, oh, they're still alive. And, um, and so it was interesting to see some of these names come forward to say, okay, if you're going to, not, if you're, if Spotify is going to allow and let's think about what Spotify is, Spotify is a, uh, you know, a publicly traded company. It's not even a US-based company. Uh, and, and we're putting, we're going to put this pressure on this company to, uh, to, to D platform. And then when they decided not to there's these consequences, right. Well, then that started, uh, people thinking, okay, well, let me, let me join the fight. And how did they do that? They go back and they look at everything that this individual's ever said. Take a lot of what he said out of context and string it together, uh, to incriminate somebody. Speaker 3 00:31:39 And I think at the end of the day, I'm not here to defend Joe Rogan. I don't think Joe Rogan needs my defense. Um, but I was in a room just last night where Lex Friedman knows Joe Rogan personally, and was saying how Joe Rogan is a thoughtful person. And if you bring a critique to him, he will take that information and he will, uh, think about it. He will determine what his best course of action is and he'll adjust. And I think that, that when I see, you know, wokeness and some of the manifestations of it, like cancel culture, what it eliminates or reduces the opportunity for his redemption and forgiveness and things that are just important parts of how we interact with each other, uh, you know, th this, this idea that you're just going to cancel somebody, uh, is it, I don't understand how that could be a rational step to get to it, unless, unless you went through a progression of steps to first figure out like, you know, is this, is this person's behavior really all that bad? Speaker 3 00:32:46 Is it redeemable? And on what basis do I have to say that this person doesn't have the right to share their opinions? And there's so much that goes into it. But I think the big loss in all of this and I'll land here is we've, we've become a culture that, that gets excited when somebody makes a mistake and we're, we're no longer, uh, you know, in that spirit of forgiveness or understanding, we just, we want to be part of the mob. And we want to be the one that, uh, you know, that, that joins the mob with, with the pitchforks. And, uh, I think this is going to have bad consequences if we don't quickly learn, uh, just how harmful it is, because it's going to come for all of us. If we're not careful I'm done Speaker 4 00:33:36 Well. So one of the things that we're putting out there is that, yeah. So what people did is, um, the initial complaint against, Speaker 1 00:33:42 Uh, Rogan was on his, uh, COVID coverage and is giving a platform to, uh, some people who are spreading, I think, verifiably wrong. I, in my view, verifiably, wrong ideas about COVID. Um, and, uh, so, and, and about the vaccines. So he was criticized on that, which is a relatively narrow issue. Then, of course, you know, people did what they always do, which is, you know, not feeling comfortable enough to, to, uh, to stick to criticize you go in there. They went kitchen sinking, right? They fill look for, they comb through all of his many hours of interviews and found everything, but the kitchen sink to throw at him, uh, including some things that as far as I can tell are rather overblown. Um, I mean, he's, he's a bit, I dunno, they found some stuff that I didn't like me, he's a bit sort of shock jock kind of, uh, stuff that he does when he's talking to his other comedians and things like that that, you know, are not my cup of tea, but it's not really, it's kind of irrelevant to whether he should be canceled or not. Speaker 1 00:34:40 Um, so yeah, there is that sense of like, you know, once they pick somebody to go after they're going to go and throw the kitchen sink at them and find all sorts of, uh, dredge up bolster to dubious things. And I think in a way they're muddling the issue. Now, on the other hand, though, look, the idea of, of Joe Rogan, not being somebody to do the about this he's, he's not corporate media. The guy just got a a hundred billion dollar contract with Spotify, which is a giant, you know, a giant corporation. He is corporate media, or is he, he's not mainstream media? Well, you know, if Fox mainstream media they're either have, you know, as many, they have more viewers than CNN or they're, it's a major media corporation reaches millions of people. So in practice, the, the problem I have is in practice, the definitions of corporate media or mainstream media basically means any bit. Speaker 1 00:35:31 I don't like who I want to beat up on, regardless of how big they are, regardless of what their audience is of how many people, people they reach. Now, you, you cannot, you know, I've, I've done the whole criticizing the mainstream media thing, um, for, for decades, let's put it that way. Um, but I started doing it back when, you know, you still had, uh, the big three networks were, were primarily, and the New York times where your primary sources of news, uh, where you, where you actually had way more of a, uh, um, a dominant control among one group, the Internet's really blown that completely out and, and made it irrelevant. So, you know, when you say, oh, I'm criticizing a multi-billion dollar company for what's being pro for, for what's being done by either paying a hundred billion dollars to, you're no longer defending the little guy against the mainstream media, you organize the corporate media. Speaker 1 00:36:29 He's just another wind of the corporate media. Okay. So I, I, I don't like that that narrative got, I think really cemented like 10 or 15 years ago back when there was a lot more truth to it when it was a bunch of scrappy bloggers taking on, um, what was every, if everybody remembers, you know, Dan rather getting fired because a bunch of scrappy bloggers found out that a report about blockbuster report on George W. Bush, uh, was based on a forged document. Um, and so it was, you know, when you have a bunch of these scrappy, unpaid bloggers, uh, taking on CBS news there, that's when that sort of narrative of, oh, you know, we're, the outsider is going as the mainstream corporate media, that's where that all got cemented. And now it sort of gets, you know, from my perspective, I see it getting used as a, uh, as a tool for, by one wing of the corporate media, I guess, other corporate media, right? Speaker 1 00:37:26 So it's being used by Spotify, against CNN. Well, you know, the, these are, um, in some ways it's the bigger player that's using this against the smaller player, uh, uh, but using that same metaphor, that's using that same imagery of, oh, you're the man, you're the big established mainstream and we're the scrappy outsiders. Uh, so you have to be careful about, again, all of these, all these, um, this language of free speech, this language of the little guy against the establishment, all of it tends to get used in a partisan environment. It gets used opportunistically, uh, and oftentimes for the opposite of what, uh, of what its original meaning was Speaker 5 00:38:12 Great Lawrence. Yes. Uh, how am I coming through right now? I think so, um, I think Roger, you hit the point essentially that I was going to bring up better than I set it, but I think what I would like to sort of just pivot away from a person like Jerome, I think there are looking more at, I guess you could say little guys relatively. Speaker 0 00:38:57 I think he's gone. Oh, I was going to, I was hoping I didn't get kicked off. Well, uh, fully, uh, you want to go ahead while we're waiting for Lawrence to get back? Speaker 6 00:39:09 Sure. Um, okay. So I'm just going to pre-phase, uh, by intervention here by saying that I'm, I'm come at this from a purely cultural perspective. And, um, so I, I don't, you know, wokeness is overblown from that perspective, there's the social perspective and whatnot, but that's not really my area of expertise now, uh, at the top, um, Rob talked about, you know, the facts relating to the article, uh, and the fact that, you know, uh, cancel culture was sort of not really a big deal. And I, I couldn't disagree more. Um, in the last month I've, I've asked for two reasons, uh, um, in the last month I've, I've met with countless artists and creators that are very small, um, very local, very regional, and the cancel culture that we see in our feeds, Twitter feeds are, you know, that, that makes up the news every night. Speaker 6 00:40:04 That's, that's the tip of the iceberg. Well, because wokeness is now entrenched in S in so much of our society that, um, that, that, uh, artists on a local and regional level are canceled all the time. And we never ever hear about their stories. And if they're not canceled, they either self self-censor or just abandon being artists altogether, because they just, they just don't live in an environment that they feel will give them any opportunity whatsoever. So, uh, so there's that. Um, and, um, and secondly, I, I'm in the process of writing an article right now, uh, that will be published on, on wrong speak, uh, um, soon. And it's, it's about the sort of woke suffocation of, of the cultural industries. And I'm focused primarily on, on Canada and, and, and the U S and the amount of money that is involved in the cultural industries is just like gigantic. Speaker 6 00:41:04 And I'm not even talking about the mainstream, uh, culture here, right? Just, just the nonprofit and individual level. We're talking billions upon billions upon billions of dollars that are annually injected into nonprofit organizations that fund artists and groups and all of them, well, I'm being an extra, you know, I'm, I'm being, you know, I'm exaggerating here a bit, but as far as I can tell all of these organizations that receive public money or money from private foundations that have a particular interest in the arts, all at deer to DEI, Wolk ideology, they're all about inclusion and equity and diversity. And, and you can, you can, you know, if you go further, you go into their, their, their, their programs and the applications to their programs. And it's all about ticking boxes, right? Who are you? What, you know, what's your background? What is the makeup of your background? Speaker 6 00:42:03 What's your financial situation and so forth. So it's all sort of veering into one direction. And, uh, so if you think that wokeness, if that person thinks that wokeness is, is not, is overblown now, what, until a few years down the road, if not a decades down the road, when culture has been well, men, when meritocracy, I mean, as far as I can tell meritocracy in the cultural industries is, is pretty much done already. So the long March is done as far as I can tell. So the premise of this person, I, haven't sorry, uh, Rob, I don't recall that name Grossman. Yeah. So, so this person is as his head so far down in the sand, it's, it's not even funny. Speaker 1 00:42:47 Well, here's, here's where I get, I think where it's coming from though, is that I think that a lot of the, a lot of the, um, debates about wokeness that you get in the media have to do naturally enough with people who are in the media, right? So it is so, uh, you know, somebody like a Joe Rogan, who's, uh, who's a big media star. And so we have a debate over him. And the thing is that this is someone who exists in an area that is actually the least controlled in some ways by, by the woke establishment, right? Because Joe Rogan has a way of getting directly out to customers, to, to listeners, to, uh, uh, to, to people who want it to people want to hear what he says to you, uh, Alex Barris that has a subsect you all these, the, the media is in many ways, the freest area where it's easiest to get around, uh, all the, um, uh, the restrictions, you know, the, the gatekeepers were laid low in the media industry a long time ago. Speaker 1 00:43:47 And I think that because of that, we spent a lot of times debating these issues where, you know, Joe, Rogan's not going to get canceled. There's no possibility of it. Now, smaller people, smaller people in the media might have feel more pressure, but even in the, in the media business, you're not going to get anywhere near the kind of pressure you're going to get if you're in academia or if you're in the arts. And it's really when you get into the nonprofit realm. And I do know the topic that the thing you're talking about, where when you, especially when you're dealing with the people that the, the, the nonprofit sector, where everything goes through these nonprofit organizations that are predominantly staffed with people who came out of the universities, you know, filled with the, the Wolf woke orthodoxy and who are totally immersed in that, and will simply not even want to talk to you if you're not part of that orthodoxy. Speaker 1 00:44:40 And now that's combined in the arsenic, especially it's combined with the fact that, um, and this something I've been writing about a lot about recently, which is that the not only has politics sort of intruded into art, but there's a whole sort of approach of didacticism in arch now where art is supposed to be about politics. Politics is supposed to be the main subject matter. And the main concern the artists has to be change agents who are fighting for, uh, you know, not only shut up, none of them are these supposed to agree with the Wolf Wilcox orthodoxy, but there are just supposed to be about the Wolf orthodoxy that the purpose of art is to promote a political ideal. I sort of review it as a, as a sort of a weird revival of, of, of Soviet socialist realism, right? Where, uh, the, um, the purpose of arch under solemn, the PR the whole purpose of art was to, uh, communicate the, um, uh, the, the consensus or the, uh, the official propaganda position of the regime tell people what political views they're supposed to have and, and how they're supposed to act and how they're supposed to behave politically. Speaker 1 00:45:50 That was the whole function of art. And that has very much become the case in the sort of highbrow art world, especially, uh, and you, I have no doubt that you'd see that spread out through the thing through the, uh, the nonprofit organizations and all that. There was a whole think about what five years or so ago, uh, that there's some, uh, a wealthy woman who had left a large amount of money to the poetry foundation. And they suddenly had, you know, millions upon millions of dollars, this huge amount of money. And the, the, the, the woke types basically went after the poetry foundation and said, we have to control this. And they got, they got the president of the foundation fired, and they basically got their hooks into it. So this, you know, giant pot of money used to promote poetry. They made sure that it would be used to promote the poetry that the woke people want and the poets that the Wolf people approve of rather than, uh, to promote poetry in general, uh, or in some non, in some neutral or nonpolitical way. Speaker 1 00:46:50 So that is definitely a huge problem. And I think that some of the debates we're having about cancel culture in other areas, you know, um, we, I think it's natural. We use rich and famous people as proxies because you've heard of them, right? People, many people have heard of Joe Rogan. They haven't heard of, you know, the artist who's concerned about, uh, uh, about getting good, not being able to get a grant because he's not, uh, he doesn't have the right views, or he's not in the right Def, uh, racial or ethnic group, et cetera. So I think that, uh, more attention needs to be paid to how this is happening in those institutions. But I think ultimately the answer is going to have to be that people who are concerned about this are going to have to work at finding new ways to create new institutions or new sources of funding for those artists. Uh, we have to recognize that, you know, a lot of the existing nonprofit institutions and, you know, the artistic institutions have been captured by this consensus and the, oh, you're not going to be able to, you know, by yelling at you, visibly yelling at them is not going to get them to change. You're going to have to create new ways of having artists be able to find their audience, new ways of artists being able to find funding and new institutions to help support them and ones that are not beholden to the same political program. Speaker 6 00:48:13 Uh, may I just had a couple of tidbits to that, Scott, thank you. Um, I would say Rob that it's, uh, it's, it's more than the nonprofit, um, the, uh, private foundations in America last year, uh, donated, uh, $80 billion to the arts. So, which is almost 80 times more than, than the government. And, uh, here in Canada, um, the department of Canadian heritage, which is sort of the, you know, the, the, the body of the government that, that oversees culture, but also sports and, and heritage and so forth also, uh, is also concerned with, uh, diversity and inclusion, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's governmental now, right? So it's, it's, I mean, it's, the takeovers is pretty much done. Speaker 1 00:49:05 Oh, I think Canada's worse than the us, because there is my impression of Canada is there is more overlap between government and private foundations there then than there is here. But, you know, I'm familiar with this. My dad worked for a fortune 500 company and I, you know, grew up occasionally visiting their headquarters and a big corporate headquarters for a major major company. And it was filled with art and all the art was junk. It was all now at the time, it wasn't political. It wasn't, it was abstract modern art. And there was one, uh, I remember there was one, um, particular piece of art has just this lumpy thing that was suddenly gilded around the edges and the, uh, the, the, the people who worked there at the corporate at the headquarters called it the golden booger, because that's what I want to get diet golden booger. Speaker 1 00:49:58 I mean, it's, it's like this really terrible abstract art. That didn't mean anything at all. And, uh, but you know, huge amounts of this corporate money poured into that. You know, when you mentioned the $80 billion being spent in the arts, you think we'd have more to show in return for it. Um, uh, you know, we should be living, we should be living as something that puts Renaissance Italy to shame, uh, given, you know, how much Kevin, how much larger our population is given how much more money and resources we're putting into the arts. We've got to be producing a, you a Michelangelo a week at the, at the rate of resources and effort we're putting into it. And it's a scandal. So this has been a problem for a long time that the, and this is, you know, I've been rereading the Fountainhead recently, as you can see it, all Iran had it all captured in, you know, in, in the 1930s about the way that these, you know, these corporate guys come in and they have no real background or knowledge or firsthand ability to judge firsthand about art. Speaker 1 00:50:53 So they just go to, they find themselves in algebra two, they find themselves at established expert who supposedly knows what he's doing. And they say, you make the decisions and they let themselves get pushed around to, you know, whatever the Vogue or fat of the moment is, whether it's abstract expressionism or, or woke art. So it's, it's a huge problem that this money gets poured in by people who really have no idea what they're spending it on. They just doing it in a second handed way for the social approval. And, uh, the current flavor of that, that we're getting is the woke flavor of it. Um, and that it, what ends up doing is that it isn't doing exactly what, what else was tube is tried to do at the Fountainhead, which is by pouring all the support into the terrible artists and taking it away from the really creative, independent thinking artists you want to crush, and you want to discourage, and you want to push out of the profession, the, the, um, uh, the independent thinkers, right. Speaker 1 00:51:52 He said, do you want to kill greatness and try and mediocrity? Yeah. So I just got to the point in the Fountainhead, by the way, where, uh, Dominique Franklin and too, we were having a discussion where two he's figured out that Peter Keating and, uh, Howard Roark went to school together. They have this long history together, and he says, well, you could see these two parallel lives. If you raise up feeder Keating and you make Howard work struggle for everything, that's what you're, that's how you're really hurt powered work is, you know, by raising up the mediocrity and making sure he has to struggle. And that's, and that's the condition we've been dealing with in the arts for a long time could stuff, guy, Speaker 7 00:52:29 Hey, how's it going? Um, yeah, no, this is a really interesting discussion because it's actually approaching wokeness from a sort of very different perspective to the regular conversation. And I just want to acknowledge that because the regular conversations got an Adele, um, I actually want to present you a couple of different points and I'm going to try to make them say, Hey, could he run and salient, which is hard cause it's late at night. Um, but I think first of all, what you're saying about the court about the corporate nature of art and creativity, it's sort of important to understand when work hit the timeline to understand the role, how, how that works and the role of it. Speaker 7 00:53:17 Because I think that there has been a general trend. I think a lot of people use work as a stand in for the 50 year or 70 year long trend of the, you know, the slow push through the institutions of Marxism and socialist philosophy. But weakness is a very specific kind of socialist philosophy. And it's a socialist philosophy. It's a philosophy that, you know, a lot of ways on the face is contradict some of the mainstream thinking of socialist philosophy in that it actually re it actually is more diverse. It's more about dividing the low, the working class that is tearing down the establishment. Speaker 7 00:54:10 And if you look into, if you look at the semantic, the S the semantic appearance of work as a phenomenon in the culture in emerges right around the time of the, the regional occupy movement. And I think that's a really important thing to recognize, because then you under, because when you look at the regional occupy movement, one of the things that was really starting to break down was the, the control of the, yeah, I guess people refer to it as the cathedral, the establishment, the joint power structure that had had the maintain cultural and social norms and particularly economic norms for a very long time. Speaker 0 00:55:02 Thank you guy. I want to make sure I get the chance to answer before the top of the hour. Speaker 1 00:55:07 Yeah. I think that recognizing the recency of wokeness as a particular variation, I would say though, that, that the thing about wokeness that I find fascinating is that it is very much a, it is as much a, an intramural battle within the left, as it is something used by the left against the right, which, which I find fascinating, for example. So some of the most trenches, some of the best criticisms of this, of the 1619 project came from the worldwide socialists website, uh, which, which kind of surprised a lot of us. But then when you think about it, they're the old left. They were for workers of the world, unite. They were for, uh, a race, a non race centered version of socialism. And then suddenly they find themselves behind the time because race suddenly becomes central to everything. And the racial issues become more important than the old economic issues. Speaker 1 00:56:00 But where I think I see a, a, um, a continuing line between the old leftism and the new woke ism is in the idea of the need for power and the need to gain power in order to restructure, you know, the, the idea that socialists the, the modern socialist ideas that we need to radically restructure society. And to do that, we need to gain power over all the institutions and over everything and everything people say and where it all goes back to really as to Mark's, uh, and his idea of the base of the superstructure. Now this, if you, uh, uh, these are the terms that he uses, uh, where mark says, well, that the base of human existence, the actual foundation of everything is the power relationships having to do with ownership of the means of production, and whether you're a capitalist or a proletarian, that's the real fundamental of human life, and then everything else. Speaker 1 00:56:58 And by everything else, he means art a very specifically means art, religion, ideas, philosophy, uh, all the other aspects of human life that people argue about. Those are just an irrelevant superstructure. That's built on top of that base and reflects that base. And so this came with, this is how you get the idea that, you know, if you have say you're a free market economist, you're not actually studying economics, you're just producing a legitimating ideology to support these underlying, uh, relationships of oppression and power having to do with ownership with the, with, uh, between the, the bourgeois and the proletariat. So this is a viewpoint in which art and philosophy and science and all of these things become subordinate to the underlying reality, suppose that underlying reality of your relationship to the oppressive structure of capitalism. And that's how you got to say, and the woke just take that. Speaker 1 00:57:53 And they substitute for the oppressive underlying structure of capitalism. They put, they express that in racial terms and they put it in, you know, was it race, class, and gender is there their Trinity that they put in there, but it's a variation on the same thing, but they've developed it, I think to even pure extent, the idea that everything, anybody says anything, anybody expresses is really just a code or a, um, an outgrowth of these underlying oppressive power structures. And so therefore we don't have to take someone's argument seriously. You know, if somebody offers an argument for why free markets are better or, or why, or if they make that argument for, for why they like classical music and why class, why is Beethoven a great composer? We don't have to listen to them because we already know the answer. We all know that, you know, that Beethoven is a white man who has been an unjustly foisted upon us, uh, uh, by the, by the, uh, white supremacist power structure, et cetera, uh, or, you know, free markets are just a rationalization for you for white supremacy and for the, uh, uh, whites having more money and more wealth and more access to, uh, the means of production than everybody else. Speaker 1 00:59:07 So you have this thing where the, the underlying political dogma becomes the beginning and ending, it cannot be questioned and everything else has to be understood in those terms. And I think that's, what's been ramped up to like, it's an old idea that goes back to the socialism and it goes back to Marxism, you know, 150 years ago or more. And, but it's, it's sort of been ramped up to a more intense level and become more widely accepted and implemented in practice in the last 10 or 15 years than, than it had been previously. Speaker 0 00:59:40 Great. Well, uh, guys said it well, uh, you do have a unique perspective. Uh, thank you for sharing it with us. I just wanted to mention briefly that, uh, tomorrow at 5:00 PM, the Atlas society asks Robbie Swaby of reason magazine, uh, Atlas society.org has the links. Um, also tomorrow at 8:00 PM, the anti-capitalism course with Steven Hicks, he does about 30 to 45 minutes of talking before doing Q and a it's pretty interactive. Um, but again, uh, Rob good insights. Thank you for taking the time on behalf of the Atlas society. Thank you to everyone for joining and participating, and we'll see you next time. Speaker 1 01:00:27 Thanks Darwin.